Seal Pup

On our walk along Littleferry beach yesterday we came across this seal pup. It was slightly over a metre long, and was lying just above the early morning's high-tide line so it seemed logical that it had probably come on to the beach at high tide.

It seemed fine so we left it, assuming that its mother had gone off to enjoy a meal and a little 'me-time'  before returning to collect it when she was ready. I was surprised therefore to read on our local Golspie Facebook site this morning that we should have reported it to the British Divers Marine Life Rescue organisation who monitor young seals. Their website had plenty of sensible suggestions as to what to do and not do in these circumstances but reporting every single seal pup on the beach seemed a bit over-the-top.

We did do one pretty obvious thing that the website recommends. When we came across the only other walkers on the beach, a young couple with four boisterous dogs, we warned them of the pup's location, and we later saw that they had left the beach before they reached it.

Perhaps seal pups are now so precious and, probably, so often disturbed by humans and their dogs that BDMLR prefer to monitor all of them, which is a sad reflection on our times.